Tabla Dubb

How can we experience the very limit of our desire? Being there, alive and alert to the complexity of an uncertain world where tradition and modernity are woven together in an unformulated way, shaping a contemporary form which demagnetises cultural clichés. An artist and performer from Cairo, Hassan Khan is a leading exponent of his discipline. In tabla dubb, he invites the audience to wander through a bare, luxuriant space where he manipulates and visually blends a maelstrom of sounds and urban images: traditional tablas, sound effects and electronic music envelop the continuous projection of images taken from the street - his way of surveying the notion of power in the streets of Cairo.

tabla dubb is an audiovisual performance where music composed and performed by the artist (sampled spliced edited and processed tabla beats, generated tone patterns, processed frequencies) is mixed to a live edit of an archive of imagery shot and edited by the artist.

tabla dubb is NOT a DJ/VJ event

tabla dubb is an attempt at fashioning a public media that uses a foundational element in popular egyptian musical culture (the tabla), within the context of a performance based on two elements: music and video. It offers a cultural practice where the politic of shared co-habitation, in a city where power is contested on a daily basis, is investigated in a concise and concentrated form.

Presence is intensified.

tabla dubb refuses to engage in the reductionist discussions around the “traditional and contemporary” imposed by the orientalizing discourses of the dominant institution; cultural production is treated as an instrument- the familiar is played with to suggest a meta of itself. This is an attempt at sidestepping the insecurities of having to constantly define specific identities, personas that are continuously promoted by official culture.

This need to view the ground as figure- as nineteenth century colonial world exhibition, is put into question.

Different sets of time, different configurations of space, are collapsed unto each other. A haunting is documented. A trace created. A psycho-geography suggested but never explained.

Hypnosis as strategy.

Urban environments are invested with hyper-reality. That which calls attention to itself, that which reveals itself as both surface and depth. That which is absolutely material yet refers to something else. That which acts as a code, a key- that which frames itself.

A position lost somewhere between confrontation and reverence, mysticism and analysis, totalization and political materialism.